I was very excited to get my hands on this book. The moment that I heard
about it, it sounded like the perfect book for me. Sci-fi and alternate time
line stories. How could you go wrong. But alas, it did. The stories were too far
out in left field. Instead of alternate time lines, they were deep into science
fiction and tales of fiction, bordering on fairy tales. It's not even a case of
improbable, but impossible (even in the realm of sci-fi). I'm sure that some
people will enjoy these stories. But I don't think that they could even make a
Doctor Who episode out of any of them.

Description

Every short story in this wonderfully varied collection has one thing in common: each features some alteration in history, some divergence from historical reality, which results in a world very different from the one we know today. As well as original stories specially commissioned from bestselling writers such as James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod, there are genre classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson's story of how World War II atomic bomber the Enola Gay, having crashed on a training flight, is replaced by the Lucky Strike with profoundly different consequences.

Author Biography

Ian Watson is a veteran SF author. He co-edited Changes: Stories of Metamorphosis with Michael Bishop, and Afterlives: Stories about Life after Death with Pamela Sargent. Ian Whates is a rising SF author who founded NewCon Press in 2006 to publish the original anthologies TimePieces, disLOCATIONS and, more recently, the all-women anthology Myth-Understandings, and also Celebration, a collection to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association, of which he is Development Director as well as editor of its on-line news and reviews magazine Matrix.